


A Year, In Decades

by Todesengel



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2011-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 16:02:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Todesengel/pseuds/Todesengel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They had a life before the 'Gates</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Year, In Decades

They met in September, when he was only three weeks into his Fellowship and spending more money than he should have on long distance calls back to Mum, just to hear her voice. He lied to her and told her 'everything's fine, Mum, I'm making loads of friends and having a wonderful time', but really, as he listened to her talk, words washing over him in comfortable waves, he was just thinking about how much he hated California, where the ocean wasn't the right color and everything was bleached out by the sun, and he began to think about going home, trying to find a genetics program in Scotland.

He was still thinking about it the next day, running through the provisions of the Fellowship in his head, which was probably how Angus managed to get free, jumping out of his hand and making an aborted bid for freedom before scuttling underneath one of the cabinets.

"Bloody hell." Carson knelt down, ran his hand underneath the cabinet. "Come on you wee bastard, come to papa now." He could see Angus crouched low, whiskers twitching, and he pushed himself as flush against the cabinet doors as he could get, groped around blindly, tongue stuck out and eyes mostly closed as if by envisioning the darkness he was reaching into he could somehow make Angus easier to find.

The sound of her shoes squeaking on the floor should have made him look up, but he'd thought it was just Anderson coming in to check on his progress, so he said, "Angus made a break for it, but don't worry. I've got it all under control."

"Angus?" she asked him, her hand on his back. A small hand, warm and delicate, and definitely not Anderson.

Carson opened his eyes and he shouldn't have stared quite so long, because she raised an eyebrow in a manner that quite clearly communicated the fact that she was already running through a mental phone list searching for the proper extension to have the lads from the psychiatric ward down here with a couple of beefy orderlies to escort this clearly deranged escapee back to his nice quiet padded room. But he'd been struck dumb, all of his faculties stolen by the sight of her, and she was still staring at him like she'd finally remembered the extension for the psych ward as 223 and she was now trying assess if he was one of the violent ones or not.

"My mouse," he said, and even as the words stuttered out, he knew he wasn't making his strongest argument for his sanity. "Angus. Test subject number 12." He pulled his hand away, started to back out and then felt Angus brush against the tips of his fingers and he made a go at it, but all he managed to do was frighten the poor thing and bang his head against the metal doors.

"Did you get him?"

He shook his head, and she flashed him a grin that made his heart stutter in arrhythmia and dropped to her knees, giving him a bit of a shove as she peered into the darkness beneath the cabinet. "Well move over, I can't see."

It took him until November to ask her out, and when he finally took her to dinner -- some place that a friend had recommended, a few blocks away from the hospital -- he was so nervous that he didn't even notice when the waiter short changed him. The food was terrible and the beer was too cold and weak besides, and Carson didn't care at all because at the end of the date he'd walked Janet back to her flat and kissed her and asked, ears blushing and not at all from the cold, "Would you like to go out again this Saturday?"

She'd smiled that heart-stuttering smile again and said, "I'd love to."

Janet was the one who made the first move, three months into the relationship, by inviting him over to her flat for dinner. He'd brought wine -- a good bottle, in point of fact -- and roses, and he'd actually managed to find a clean shirt and a pair of pants that didn't have blue stains where he'd absentmindedly wiped his hands, and he got as far as the living room before Janet pulled him down and kissed him with a thoroughness that left him panting and the wine bottle rolling underneath the couch.

He wasn't sure what happened to the roses.

"Janet," he said, and licked his lips, which tingled and tasted like garlic and tomatoes and sweet marsala. He reached out his hand, brushed a strand of her hair behind her ear, let it rest on her cheek. With his other hand he toyed with the bottom of her shirt, felt the warmth and pull of her body beneath the thin cotton. "Is this all right?"

"Believe me, Carson, I'd let you know if it wasn't."

They ended up in the bedroom, a trail of clothes scattered between the couch where they'd started kissing and the bed that sagged and creaked beneath them, every action punctuated with a groan of the metal springs. They made love, and that was a phrase Carson hated, but it was the only way to describe how it felt to touch Janet, to taste her and feel her and bury himself within her. It was love, and it was wonderful, and for someone who was so small she was surprisingly heavy, lying on top of him her head tucked underneath his chin. Her hair tickled his nose every time he moved.

They ended up ordering Chinese take-away, the dinner Janet had prepared burnt beyond recognition, and they ate in bed, Carson dripping brown sauce everywhere as he struggled manfully with the chopsticks.

"Would you like a fork?" Janet, of course, had no problems with the chopsticks, and she didn't even attempt to hide her smile as she watched Carson try to eat.

"No, thank you." The eggroll he'd been trying to pick up fell onto the sheets and he glared at it. She picked it up with her fingers, dipped it into the plum sauce and handed it to him.

He licked her fingers clean, slowly, one by one.

They moved in together at the beginning of July, which wasn't the brightest idea either of them had ever had, because it was hot and the garbage chute of the apartment building was blocked, and they hadn't been able to afford a building with an elevator, which would have been bad in any circumstance but made unaccountably worse by just the thought of having to cart all of their furniture up those blasted stairs. It took them two days to move in completely, furniture more or less organized into a formation that allowed for easy movement in and out and wouldn't keep them trapped inside when the entire building went up like the matchbox it was. Not that it made much of a difference how their apartment was organized at the moment, since all of their planned alleys were blocked by the heavy cardboard boxes that held the accumulated tomes of their trade.

They'd barely closed the door on Janet's cousins -- big, burly men who shared her sarcasm if not her size or sweetness -- before Carson began to strip her down, lick at the sweat that had accumulated on her skin and made her shine in the late sunlight like she'd been gilded, coated in diamonds. She laughed and then gasped, and later Carson got very red when the little old lady who lived in apartment 5C winked knowingly at him as he collected the evening newspaper from outside their front door.

Janet left for her yearly stint with the Air Force the day after the fourth, with half their stuff still unpacked and Carson's reassurances that he'd get everything finished just fine without her ringing in her ears.

Neither one of them had believed him, of course.

He reorganized the bookshelf four times -- once by title, once by author, once by size and finally once by subject -- before she returned exactly forty-five days later. Her hands smelled of smoke and oil, and she sighed as he stripped her slowly, so painfully aroused by her uniform. So terribly disturbed by the sudden mental flash of her wielding a gun.

He traced the delicate patterns of her veins, muttered the Latin for all the parts of her body like he was learning anatomy all over again.

"It's the metacarpus," she gaspingly corrected him, when he called the tiny bones of her tiny hands the metatarsus while trying to kiss each one.

"I must be doing something wrong if you're still that coherent," he teased her, and the sex was slow and gentle like sunshine and honey.

Things started going badly in April, when they were both stressed out by the future and life and all things had to end, eventually. As doctors, they knew that, knew about the impermanence of life, the fragility of flesh. Knew about the ending of Fellowships, of residencies, of little things like visas and active duty and a whole host of complications that sprang up like an unexpected post-surgery infection.

Only there wasn't a medication available to heal this illness.

And that was probably why a stupid little thing like Janet complaining about the tea leaves clogging the sink spiraled out into a roaring, raging fight about nothing at all. Carson stormed out and spent six days in the lab, sleeping on unused gurneys and taking out all of his frustrations on Angus, Duncan and Sunshine and writing his lab reports with a certain viciousness that left deep impressions in the paper and made his words look spiky.

On the seventh night, as an act of contrition, he brought home bluebells and apple blossoms and Mexican take-away from the hole-in-the-wall that Janet loved so much and he hated because everything was too spicy for his tongue and lips and heart to handle. She wore her dress uniform and gave him a striptease that almost made him come just sitting in the chair she'd pushed him into, a white-knuckled grip on the armrests.

Neither of them talked about the future until a slow Sunday in May when she put an envelope in front of him at breakfast and said, in short, clipped words that lacked all of the wonderful intimacy and humor he knew, "I'm being deployed."

He put down his burnt toast and swallowed a few times. Thought about the letter he'd received from the Roslin Institute, and although he hadn't said yes, precisely, he knew that it was where he wanted to be; knew that this kitchen, with this person, was also where he wanted to be.

"I've been offered a position," he said, slowly. "In Scotland."

"I'm going to Southeast Asia."

He wasn't sure if she should be telling him that, but it doesn't really matter. He won't be going with her, like she won't be coming with him, and it was only after they parted in early June and he was home again where everything seemed much colder than he remembered, that he realized he never said he loved her.

He wrote her long, rambling letters -- real letters, pen to paper, and not just because he was deathly afraid of breaking one of the computers in the lab or causing the software to do...something, but because he thought of it as romantic. Long, pointless letters about his work, his mum, his colleagues, the weather, the sheep, the rocks, the paper often spotted with the blue from his dyes, the ink smeared by the careless brush of his hand. She wrote him short, quirky replies about her allergies, her superiors, and the food, which she was sure Carson would find wholly objectionable but she found delightful.

Neither of them ever mentioned dating or love.

He didn't know when her letters became less personal, more perfunctory, filled with large silences that loomed behind her words. He read names that seemed to be filled with something huge and important, meaning dancing behind carefully chosen words, strange absences patched up with shoddy craftsmanship.

It hurt that he was no longer a person she could tell everything to.

Six years after he helped play God and created life -- albeit of an ovine nature -- he got a letter from her that read, simply, "Daniel died today, and there was nothing I could do about it."

He almost caught a plane to America, so desperate was his urge to comfort her. But what could he say? How could he help her grieve for this Daniel about whom he knew nothing other than his first name and the fact of his death?

He wrote her a long letter, instead, rambling about his past, his life, his father who'd had cancer; his younger half-brother who'd been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. "I love you," he wrote at the end, and almost scratched it out.

In December, he received a call from her in the middle of the night and her voice sounded strange and tight and secretive, although all she talked about was that time in January when they'd managed to save up enough cash for five nights in Aspen. They'd gone skiing -- or, rather, Janet had gone skiing and he'd managed to stay in an upright position and get down the slope -- and ate lamb that tasted like heaven and he'd made love to her in front of a roaring fire until the static charge they built up became too painful and they'd had to stop. She talked about mountains and snow and 'do you remember when?' and Carson had made the appropriate noises and focused on her voice instead of her words.

"We should go to Aspen again sometime," she said to him, and it wasn't until March, when an Englishman and an American, dressed in dark suits, sat down in his kitchen and made him an offer that he'd be a fool to refuse, that he finally understood what she meant by that.

So much for his hopeless romance, he thought to himself, and even though Nevada wasn't terribly far from Colorado, it was still farther than Scotland had been.

He drove to Colorado Springs on the odd weekend, cursing Americans and their cars and the fact that they all drove on the wrong side of the road. Coffee shops and cafes and parks, and not once did she invite him home, and it felt like the awkward dates he'd had as a teenager, except worse. There were secrets in her eyes, and he knew she had something to do with the three vials of blood that had been waiting for him when he first arrived at Area 51, simply labeled Patients J, C and O in an anonymous typeface.

Peculiar blood that made him think the Americans were trying to cover up some sort of nuclear accident given the number of mutations he observed. Or perhaps these anonymous patients were victims of some new disease; there were many things he wasn't told, and half-truths, and his clearance was just high enough for him to know that there was something monumental just beyond his reach. Just high enough for him to feel frustrated that it wasn't any higher.

It wasn't a surprise at all when she pressed a small box into his hands containing a fourth tube; he could just make out the letters, D, N, I and L in the impressions on the leftover paper that had once been a label before it had been torn off; or, more likely, washed off given the way the paste clumped together in a roll when he rubbed his fingers on the tacky residue.

She seemed terribly disappointed when he reported back that there were no genetic anomalies.

He met Cassie in August, so shocked that he made even more of a fool of himself than normal, spilling coffee all over his shirt and banging his knee right soundly on the underside of the table.

"So you're Mom's new boyfriend," she said, with the bored indifference of a teenager and the undercurrent of distaste of a daughter. Her eyes measured him slowly, like Janet's did, and she gave him a one-shoulder shrug when she was done. "I guess you're cute."

"Oh, no, I'm just a friend," he stammered at her.

"Whatever." She flicked her hair behind her ear, fished out a pair of sunglasses from her purse. "Tell Mom that she should let you come over for dinner sometime."

Carson thought about what Cassie had said on the drive back, about the assumptions she had made, about what the Janet he never saw must act like, and decided that maybe this was the second chance he'd sometimes half-dreamed about in the wee hours of the night when the world doubled and redoubled in front of his tired eyes. Second chances, and he made sure that their next meeting was at a restaurant that managed to duplicate the ambiance of the one where they'd had their first date. Soppy, really, and stupid because they were both well past the age of being able to only afford crappy food, but Janet's eyes had lit up with humor and she'd smiled the smile that always made Carson melt, and it was a first step.

He moved faster, this time, pushed a little harder, and ended up making a lot of long drives back to Nevada on Monday mornings, using McDonald's coffee to get the sleep out of his eyes. The other lab techs teased him, and he shrugged and blushed, and did his work and waited for Fridays.

It was harder and harder to leave on Mondays.

In early February, he bought the ring, and maybe it was a little fast, but it was also very, very slow since they'd really had the equivalent of an eleven-year courtship and even in the nine-odd years where they'd communicated mostly through letters and expensive phone calls and the odd run-in at a medical conference, between Sarah and Julie and Anna and Beth, whom he'd almost married but didn't, she'd still been the only one he could see his future with. Been the only one he wanted to introduce to his mother, the only one he'd be willing to defy his mother for when the inevitable sniffs of disapproval would start and the mutterings of 'she's not good enough for you' would begin.

"Hello," he said to Cassie when she opened the door to him, giving him a look that was mostly teenager but equally Janet -- that particularly knowing look she gave him when he had a secret and couldn't hide it. He manfully resisted the urge to shuffle his feet. There was absolutely nothing he could do about the blush.

"I'm going out," she told him. "With Peter."

It wasn't quite approval, but it wasn't exactly resignation, either, or loathing, and Cassie knew what he had planned and Carson figured that this was the closest he was going to get to approval to marry her mother. Tacit complicity in his romantic plans. They were already racking up debts to be paid off in the future. He wondered what he'd owe her for this one.

"What happened to Dominic?"

She rolled her eyes at him, managing to convey not only that Dominic was old news but that Carson should have been privy to that fact long ago and, God, could he _be_ any more of a dork?

"Mom called. She should be home soon." She shrugged on her jacket and held up her cell phone before Carson could ask if she had it, let him see that it was fully charged. "Don't wait up for me."

"Your curfew is at ten."

She rolled her eyes again, and when she was gone and he was alone, Carson sat down and thought of all the things he should have brought with him. Flowers, for sure. Or an adequate knowledge of cooking so that he could've made her dinner instead of just taking her out to an expensive one.

The hours ticked by. Carson didn't pace because every step made the ring thump against his thigh, and the longer he thought about what he was doing, the more he wondered if maybe he'd been too hasty. There were still things he didn't know; things he didn't tell her. Things she didn't tell him.

Things like, why didn't she call if she was going to be this late, since they'd had plans that had been made well in advance. Things like, what did she do, exactly, underneath that mountain.

At nine-thirty a blond showed up, tall, crying, and it took Carson a long moment before he recognized her as Samantha, because she looked...different. She wasn't the confident Major he'd been introduced to. She looked broken, somehow, and it was only because she was trying to pull herself together, trying to cut herself off from this stranger who was standing so out of place in Janet's home that Carson knew what had happened.

He'd seen that face. Made that face. Broken the news to too many family members during his brief stint in Emergency. Had the news broken to him twice more than he'd ever wanted to hear it.

"She's dead, isn't she," he said, and the words were hollow.

"Where's Cassie?"

"A date." He didn't realize he was clenching the tiny velvet box until Samantha shot an odd look at his hand, buried in his pocket. "She has a cell phone. I should --"

"I'll do it."

Carson nodded and time, which had seemed so slow, sped up until it became a blur of nothing except feeling the heavy weight of the ring, feeling himself being shut out, pushed away by these people he barely knew until he wanted to scream out that he'd known Janet longer than any of them, loved her longer than any of them, and he had the right to grieve. But he hadn't known this Janet, the one who managed to die underneath a mountain. The one who rallied all these people together into a tight, impenetrable wall that kept him out as finally as their own ambitions had kept them apart all those hazy years ago.

They buried her beneath the mountain where she'd died, in a service full of secrecy and military honor.

They didn't let him go.

He wasn't sure he wanted to.


End file.
